Full Article Critiques

Silk Road

  • Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference?

Yes it seems as though each fact is referenced from a reliable source. The sources are either peer reviewed articles or renowned news sources such as The New York Times and The Wall St Journal. There are 93 citations and looking through they all seem reliable.

  • Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?

The only part of the article that I found distracting is the section about similar sites. I believe that this could have have been included in the see also section instead. Other than that I found this article very interesting and on topic.

  • Check a few citations. Do the links work? Is there any close paraphrasing or plagiarism in the article?

Due to there being 93 citations it is difficult to tell if some information has been closely paraphrased however I have clicked on a 10 of the citations and they all worked.

  • Read the "talk" page of each article. What do you find there?

There are some corrections people mentioned in 2015, but have since been fixed. There is also more information about the creator of Silk Road, a man named Dread Pirate Roberts. It has also been used in multiple Wikiprojects.

  • Take a look at the Wikipedia quality scale and compare it to your article. Where do you think it falls? If the article has a rating assigned to it, do you think it is accurate?

I can not seem to find the quality scale rating for this article which is surprising given how much information is on the page. I would give this article an A rating. I believe it meets all the guidelines for an A rated article. All the sources seem solid and it seems very throughly reviewed.

Full Article Critiques

Yik Yak

  • Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference?

Yes, each statement in this article is referenced with a reliable reference. Most of the references are from Yik Yak or reliable news sources.

  • Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?

For the most part everything is relevant. The last section "Use in US Politics" seems very irrelevant and it seem that the article is not enhanced by this section. Other than that I believe this article is very concise and gets the information it needs to across.

  • Check a few citations. Do the links work? Is there any close paraphrasing or plagiarism in the article?

Given that there are 34 citations it is again hard to tell if there is any close paraphrasing or plagiarism in this article. I believe that this article has been peer reviewed and the sources seem to be very legitimate.

  • Read the "talk" page of each article. What do you find there?

There is some news about advertising and updates that need to be made that were noticed in 2015. One user says that someone is trying to insert things about a competing app. The last thing is students from out class who have done article evaluations.

  • Take a look at the Wikipedia quality scale and compare it to your article. Where do you think it falls? If the article has a rating assigned to it, do you think it is accurate?

The article has a rating of "start class" I am surprised by this, but after evaluating other articles it seems a lot of articles that use reliable sources have been rated as "start class". I believe this is due to Wikipedia reviewers not completely reviewing these articles yet. If I had to give this article a rating I would probably give it a B due to having no major problems.

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I plan to write more on the trials of other people involved with the Silk Road Marketplace and expand on the ones that are currently explained. I am also intruiged with the section that talks about the "book club" and I believe that more can be added to that.

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Wikipedia Rough Draft

Arrests

            While there is not specific information on other trials, it has been found that there have been over 130 arrests connected with The Silk Road Market Place[1], Although it is important to note that a lot of these arrests may not be directly related to The Silk Road Market Place and may not be public information due to legal reasons.

DPR Book Club

            Some of the titles included mainstream books as well as books that contained terrorist information such as The Anarchist Cookbook and Defeating Electromagnetic Door Locks. Most of the titles on this book club were pirated. This book club still lives on through a private Tor based chatroom. [2]


[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/this-researcher-is-tallying-arrests-from-dark-web-markets [2] https://www.dailydot.com/news/silk-road-dread-pirate-roberts-book-club/